A Betrayal in Winter lpq-2

by Abraham Daniel

  than the ravages of age. The Dai-kvo was of the same generation, but

  Maati saw none of his vigor and strength here. The sick man took a pose

  of command. "Tell me of him."

  Maati stared down at the woven reed mat on which he knelt and fought to

  push away the weariness of his travels. It had been days since he had

  bathed, his robes were not fresh, and his mind was uneasy. But he was

  here, called to this meeting or possibly this confrontation, even before

  his bags had been unpacked. He could feel the attention of the servants

  of the Khai-there were perhaps a dozen in the room. Some slaves, others

  attendants from among the highest ranks of the utkhaiem. The audience

  might be called private, but it was too well attended for Maati's

  comfort. The choice was not his. He took the bowl of heated wine he had

  been given, sipped it, and spoke.

  "Otah-kvo and I met at the school, most high. He already wore the black

  robes awarded to those who had passed the first test when I met him. I

  ... I was the occasion of his passing the second."

  The Khai Machi nodded. It was an almost inhumanly graceful movement,

  like a bird or some finely wrought mechanism. Maati took it as a sign

  that he should continue.

  "He came to me after that. He ... he taught me things about the school

  and about myself. He was, I think, the best teacher I have known. I

  doubt I would have been chosen to study with the Dai-kvo if it hadn't

  been for him. But then he refused the chance to become a poet."

  "And the brand," the Khai said. "He refused the brand. Perhaps he had

  ambitions even then."

  He was a boy, and angry, Maati thought. He had beaten Tahi-kvo and

  Milah-kvo on his own terms. He'd refused their honors. Of course he

  didn't accept disgrace.

  The utkhaiem high enough to express an opinion nodded among themselves

  as if a decision made in heat by a boy not yet twelve might explain a

  murder two decades later. Maati let it pass.

  "I met him again in Saraykeht," Maati said. "I had gone there to study

  under Heshai-kvo and the andat Removing-the-Part-ThatContinues. Otah-kvo

  was living under an assumed name at the time, working as a laborer on

  the docks."

  "And you recognized him?"

  "I did," Maati said.

  "And yet you did not denounce him?" The old man's voice wasn't angry.

  Maati had expected anger. Outrage, perhaps. What he heard instead was

  gentler and more penetrating. When he looked up, the redrimmed eyes were

  very much like Otah-kvo's. Even if he had not known before, those eyes

  would have told him that this man was Otah's father. He wondered briefly

  what his own father's eyes had looked like and whether his resembled

  them, then forced his mind back to the matter at hand.

  "I did not, most high. I regarded him as my teacher, and ... and I

  wished to understand the choices he had made. We became friends for a

  time. Before the death of the poet took me from the city."

  "And do you call him your teacher still? You call him Otah-kvo. That is

  a title for a teacher, is it not?"

  Maati blushed. He hadn't realized until then that he was doing it.

  "An old habit, most high. I was sixteen when I last saw Otah-cha. I'm

  thirty now. It has been almost half my life since I have spoken with

  him. I think of him as a person I once knew who told me some things I

  found of use at the time," Maati said, and sensing that the falsehood of

  those words might be clear, he continued with some that were more nearly

  true. "My loyalty is to the Dai-kvo."

  "That is good," the Khai Machi said. "Tell me, then. How will you

  conduct this examination of my city?"

  "I am here to study the library of Machi," Maati said. "I will spend my

  mornings there, most high. After midday and in the evenings I will move

  through the city. I think ... I think that if Otah-kvo is here it will

  not be difficult to find him."

  The gray, thin lips smiled. Maati thought there was condescension in

  them. Perhaps even pity. He felt a blush rise in his cheeks, but kept

  his face still. He knew how he must appear to the Khai's weary eyes, but

  he would not flinch and confirm the man's worst suspicions. He swallowed

  once to loosen his throat.

  "You have great faith in yourself," the Khai Machi said. "You come to my

  city for the first time. You know nothing of its streets and tunnels,

  little of its history, and you say that finding my missing son will be

  easy for you."

  "Rather, most high, I will make it easy for him to find me."

  It might have been his imagination-he knew from experience that he was

  prone to see his own fears and hopes in other people instead of what was

  truly there-but Maati thought there might have been a flicker of

  approval on the old man's face.

  "You will report to me," the Khai said. "When you find him, you will

  come to me before anyone else, and I will send word to the Dai-kvo."

  "As you command, most high," Maati lied. He had said that his loyalty

  lay with the Dal-hvo, but there was no advantage he could see to

  explaining all that meant here and now.

  The meeting continued for a short time. The Khai seemed as exhausted by

  it as Maati himself was. Afterward, a servant girl led him to his

  apartments within the palaces. Night was already falling as he closed

  the door, truly alone for the first time in weeks. The journey from his

  home in the Dai-kvo's village wasn't the half-season's trek he would

  have had from Saraykeht, but it was enough, and Maati didn't enjoy the

  constant companionship of strangers on the road.

  A fire had been lit in the grate, and warm tea and cakes of honeyed

  almonds waited for him at a lacquered table. He lowered himself into the

  chair, rested his feet, and closed his eyes. Being here, in this place,

  had a sense of unreality to it. To have been entrusted with anything of

  importance was a surprise after his loss of status. The thought stung,

  but he forced himself to turn in toward it. He had lost a great deal of

  the Dai-kvo's trust between his failure in Saraykeht and his refusal to

  disavow Liat, the girl who had once loved Otah-kvo but left both him and

  the fallen city to be with Maati, when it became clear she was bearing

  his child. If there had been time between the two, perhaps it might have

  been different. One scandal on the heels of the other, though, had been

  too much. Or so he told himself. It was what he wanted to believe.

  A scratch at the door roused him from his bitter reminiscences. He

  straightened his robes and ran a hand through his hair before he spoke.

  "Come in."

  The door slid open and a young man of perhaps twenty summers wearing the

  brown robes of a poet stepped in and took a pose of greeting. Maati

  returned it as he considered Cehmai Tyan, poet of Mach]. The broad

  shoulders, the open face. Here, Maati thought, is what I should have

  been. A talented boy poet who studied under a master while young enough

  to have his mind molded to the right shape. And when the time came, he

  had taken that burden on himself for the sake of his city. As I should

>   have done.

  "I only just heard you'd arrived," Cehmai Tyan said. "I left orders at

  the main road, but apparently they don't think as much of me as they

  pretend."

  There was a light humor in his voice and manner. As if this were a game,

  as if he were a person whom anyone in Machi-or in the worldcould truly

  treat with less than total respect. He held the power to soften stone-it

  was the concept, the essential idea, that Manat I)oru had translated

  into a human form all those generations ago. This widefaced, handsome

  boy could collapse every bridge, level every mountain. The great towers

  of Machi could turn to a river of stone, fast-flowing and dense as

  quicksilver, which would lay the city to ruin at his order. And he made

  light of being ignored as if he were junior clerk in some harbormaster's

  house. Maati couldn't tell if it was an affectation or if the poet was

  really so utterly naive.

  "The Khai left orders as well," Maati said.

  "Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that, then. I trust everything is

  acceptable with your apartments?"

  "I ... I really don't know. I haven't really looked around yet. 'Ibo

  busy sitting on something that doesn't move, I suppose. I close my eyes,

  and I feel like I'm still jouncing around on the back of a cart."

  The young poet laughed, a warm sound that seemed full of selfconfidence

  and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally

  reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion

  beside the fire, legs crossed under him.

  "I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning,"

  Cehmai said. "The man who guards the library is ... he's a good man, but

  he's protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the

  ages."

  "Like a poet," Maati said.

  Cehmai grinned. "I suppose so. Only he'd have made a terrible poet. He's

  puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the

  keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people

  in the city can read. If he'd ever been given something important to do,

  he'd have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if

  I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to

  you, I expect he'll be fine. It's that first negotiation that's tricky."

  Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.

  "There's no call to take you from your duties," he said. "I expect the

  order of the Khai will suffice."

  "I wouldn't only be doing it as a favor to you, Maati-kvo," Cehmai said.

  The honorific took Maati by surprise, but the young poet didn't seem to

  notice his reaction. "Baarath is a friend of mine, and sometimes you

  have to protect your friends from themselves. You know?"

  Maati took a pose that was an agreement and looked into the flames.

  Sometimes men could be their own worst enemies. That was truth. He

  remembered the last time he had seen Otah-kvo. It had been the night

  Maati had admitted what Liat had become to him and what he himself was

  to her. His old friend's eyes had gone hard as glass. Heshai-kvo, the

  poet of Saraykeht, had died just after that, and Maati and Liat had left

  the city together without seeing Otah-kvo again.

  The betrayal in those dark eyes haunted him. He wondered how much the

  anger had festered in his old teacher over the years. It might have

  grown to hatred by now, and Maati had come to hunt him down. The fire

  danced over the coal, flames turning the black to gray, the stone to

  powder. He realized that the boy poet had been speaking, and that the

  words had escaped him entirely. Maati took a pose of apology.

  "My mind wandered. You were saying?"

  "I offered to come by at first light," Cehmai said. "I can show you

  where the good teahouses are, and there's a streetcart that sells the

  best hot eggs and rice in the city. Then, perhaps, we can brave the

  library?"

  "That sounds fine. Thank you. But now I think I'd best unpack my things

  and get some rest. You'll excuse me."

  Cehmai bounced up in a pose of apology, realizing for the first time

  that his presence might not be totally welcome, and Maati waved it away.

  They made the ritual farewells, and when the door closed, Maati sighed

  and rose. He had few things: thick robes he had bought for the journey

  north, a few hooks including the small leatherbound volume of his dead

  master's that he had taken from Saraykeht, a packet of letters from

  Liat, the most recent of them years old now. The accumulated memories of

  a lifetime in two bags small enough to carry on his hack if needed. It

  seemed thin. It seemed not enough.

  He finished the tea and almond cakes, then went to the window, slid the

  paper-thin stone shutter aside, and looked out into the darkness. Sunset

  still breathed indigo into the western skyline. The city glittered with

  torches and lanterns, and to the south the glow of the forges of the

  smith's quarter looked like a brush fire. The towers rose black against

  the stars, windows lit high above him where some business took place in

  the dark, thin air. Maati sighed, the night cold in his face and lungs.

  All these unknown streets, these towers, and the lacework of tunnels

  that ran beneath the city: midwinter roads, he'd heard them called. And

  somewhere in the labyrinth, his old friend and teacher lurked, planning

  murder.

  Maati let his imagination play a scene: Otah-kvo appearing before him in

  the darkness, blade in hand. In Maati's imagination, his eyes were hard,

  his voice hoarse with anger. And there he faltered. He might call for

  help and see Otah captured. He might fight him and end the thing in

  blood. He might accept the knife as his due. For a dream with so vivid a

  beginning, Maati could not envision the end.

  He closed the shutter and went to throw another black stone onto the

  fire. His indulgence had turned the room chilly, and he sat on the

  cushion near the fire as the air warmed again. His legs didn't fold as

  easily as Cehmai's had, but if he shifted now and again, his feet didn't

  go numb. He found himself thinking fondly of Cehmai-the boy was easy to

  befriend. Otah-kvo had been like that, too.

  Maati stretched and wondered again whether, if all this had been a song,

  he would have sung the hero's part or the villain's.

  No ONE HAD EVER SEEN IDAAN'S REBELLIONS AS HUNGER. THA'1' HAD BEEN their

  fault. If her friends or her brothers transgressed against the etiquette

  of the court, consequences came upon them, shame or censure. But Idaan

  was the favored daughter. She might steal a rival girl's gown or arrive

  late to the temple and interrupt the priest. She could evade her

  chaperones or steal wine from the kitchens or dance with inappropriate

  men. She was Idaan Machi, and she could do as she saw fit, because she

  didn't matter. She was a woman. And if she'd never screamed at her

  father in the middle of his court that she was as much his child as

  Biitrah or Danat or Kaiin, it was because she feared in her bones that

  he would only agree, make some airy comment to dismiss
the matter, and

  leave her more desperate than before.

  Perhaps if once someone had taken her to task, had treated her as if her

  actions had the same weight as other people's, things would have ended

  differently.

  Or perhaps folly is folly because you can't see where it moves from

  ambition into evil. Arguments that seem solid and powerful prove hollow

  once it's too late to turn back. Arguments like Why should it be right

  for them but wrong for me?

  She haunted the Second Palace now, breathing in the emptiness that her

  eldest brother had left. The vaulted arches of stone and wood echoed her

  soft footsteps, and the sunlight that filtered though the stone shutters

  thickened the air to a golden twilight. Here was the bedchamber, bare

  even of the mattress he and his wife had slept upon. There, the workshop

  where he had labored on his enthusiasms, keeping engineers by his side

  sometimes late into the night or on into morning. The tables were empty

  now. Dust lay thick on them, ignored even by the servants until the time

  came for some new child of the Khaiem to take residence ... to live in

  this opulence and keep his ear pricked for the sound of his brother's

  hunting dogs.

  She heard Adrah coming long before he stepped into the room. She

  recognized his gait by the sound of it, and didn't call. He was clever,

  she thought bitterly; if he wanted to find her, he could puzzle it out.

  Adrah Vaunyogi, bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, father of her children

  if all went well. Whatever well meant anymore.

  "There you are," Adrah said. She could see his anger in the way he held